Abstract
This paper responds to a recently popular objection to non-naturalist, robust moral realism. The objection is that moral realism is morally objectionable, because realists are committed to taking evidence about the distribution (or non-existence) of non-natural properties to be relevant to their first-order moral commitments. I argue that such objections fail. The moral realist is indeed committed to conditionals such as “If there are no non-natural properties, then no action is wrong.” But the realist is not committed to using this conditional in a modus-ponens inference upon coming to believe its antecedent. Placing the discussion in a wider epistemological discussion—here, that of “junk-knowledge”, and of how background knowledge determines the relevance of purported evidence—shows that this objection does not exert a price from the realist.
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12 September 2020
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01537-5
Notes
In this paper, I will be discussing only robust, non-naturalist realism, which is the focus of the objection. For discussion of more minimal, quietist realism in this context, see Golub (manuscript).
See my Talking Morality Seriously (2011), chapter 2. And for a more extended discussion of this way of breaking with the purported moral neutrality of metaethics, see especially the appendix there. Perhaps some of the writers I proceed to discuss can also be understood as claiming not that realism has the relevant first-order implications all on its own, but rather that it has them once conjoined with plausible auxiliary premises. This will not affect my response to them in this paper. (And for the record, I do not myself think that realism entails, without any further premise, substantive moral conclusions.).
It would have sounded better to say “If there are no non-natural facts, then everything is permitted”. But this would have been less clear, because it’s not clear that “permitted” means (in every context) merely the denial of a moral status (wrongness), rather than some alternative positive moral status.
This is very close to Hayward’s (2019, 2) way of putting things. See below for the claim that Hayward is trading on an ambiguity of “could”. Hayward’s main target is Parfit, who endorses conditionals like (C1) explicitly – Hayward calls them Parfit-conditionals. So I want to be clear at the outset that while I’m going to argue that Hayward’s objection fails as an objection to robust realism, he may very well succeed in exposing problems in Parfit’s specific texts. I am not invested in defending a specific person – just the view.
This dilemma is Bedke’s way of putting things. There are several differences between Bedke’s and Hayward’s arguments. First, Bedke’s argument is more clearly epistemological, while Hayward’s tries to remain on the metaphysical level. Second, and partly as a consequent, Bedke’s argument – as he explicitly notes (2019, 3) – is directly only an ad hominem argument against realists. It’s an argument against realism only to the extent that it counts against a view that it can’t be held without either irrationality or immorality. Hayward’s argument does not go through such a detour. Still, for my purposes here the differences between the two papers are less significant than their common theme, and even though I will for the most part focus on Bedke, everything I say applies, as far as I can see, to Hayward pretty much as is.
There’s a similar line also in Horn (2019).
See my review of Sobel (2018) and my “How Principles Ground” (2019). To an extent, I rely there on claims made by Fine (2002, 2012).
The same line of thought is also a natural understanding of Fitzpatrick’s (2018, 8–9) response to Jackson, even though Fitzpatrick doesn’t use the term “grounding” and doesn’t refer to the grounding literature.
Berker (2018) argues for the unity of grounding, so it may seem like the response to Erdur in the text requires rejecting Berker’s arguments. But I don’t think this is needed for my purposes here (though I also think his arguments can be adequately responded to, and the unity of grounding can be plausibly rejected). When Berker defends the unity of grounding what he rejects is not different kinds of grounding relations, but different kinds of grounding relations that are not ultimately inter-definable. In order to show, though, that Erdur’s argument fails because of the equivocation discussed in the text, we don’t need the two different grounding relations to be utterly independent of one another.
An anonymous referee suggested that perhaps what I have in mind is the subjunctive cousin of C3, namely C3′: “Had I not had a brain, I wouldn’t have had thoughts.” It’s important to see, then, that this is not what’s going on. First, C3 (and not just C3′) obviously follows form the (perhaps necessary) universal generalization that for any creature X, if X doesn’t have a brain, X doesn’t have thoughts. Second, the (epistemically) possible evidence whose effect I want to check is that I don’t have a brain, not that on some other possible world I don’t.
I heard this example many, many years ago, from Stephen Schiffer in a conversation whose context I don’t now remember (but it was not in metaethics).
This example works very well for my purposes here, but is nevertheless not without shortcomings: One may believe (C3) not because it follows from the general theory as in the text, but simply because its consequent is absurd. So let me stipulate that this is not the case here – namely, perhaps (C3) hadn’t occurred to me until it was pointed out to me that it follows from a general theory that I believe. And note also that I get to cases with a consequent the falsehood of which one is less certain of later in the text.
Because all analogies are suspicious, let me say the following. The discussion of C3 was intended merely as a (clear) example of the junk knowledge phenomenon. Once that lesson – that junk knowledge is a thing, so to speak – has been learned, C3 drops out of the argumentative picture. Even if there are important differences between C3 on one side and C1 and C2 on the other, still this doesn’t suffice to challenge my argument: What would have to be shown is that C1 and C2 are different in the ways relevant to whether or not knowing them amounts to junk knowledge compared to C3. In order to show that, one would need a fuller account of when a known conditional is junk knowledge, and I don’t have such an account up my sleeve (though I say more about this below).
I thank an anonymous referee for several relevant points here.
He also makes some other points, with some of which I am not sure that I agree.
I don’t want to be making any point about the psychology of Ivan, Dostoevsky’s character, of course. What I say in the text is true, I believe, of the point of those invoking something like Ivan’s Conditional in metaethical contexts.
Again, perhaps excluding Parfit. See note 5 above.
In this paragraph in the text I am using “epistemic possibility” somewhat loosely. On some understandings, a proposition p is epistemically possible for a believer B iff the evidence available to B together with ideal reasoning do not suffice to rule out p. (See, for instance, Kment (2017, Sect. 1), and the many references there.) On such an understanding, it’s not clear that what I say in the text is true. The sense of epistemic possibility I’m after is the sense in which it’s true to say such things as “For all we know, Goldbach’s Conjecture may be false.” even if Goldbach’s conjecture – as we will find out at some point in the future – is true, metaphysically and perhaps conceptually necessary, and knowable a priori. When Hayward and Bedke ask us realists to imagine a case in which highly surprising evidence comes in, evidence that may give us conclusive reasons to change our minds about metaphysically necessary claims, this is the relevant sense. For comparison, consider: What would you believe if all the mathematicians suddenly agreed that some new genius found a flaw in the proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, and that some computer program came up with a counter-example? Why, you would believe that Fermat’s Theorem is false. This counterfactual in no way shows that you don’t really believe that it’s true, as a matter of a fairly strong necessity, nor does it show that there’s any incoherence in your belief (that it’s true and necessary) and your disposition (to give up on that belief in the relevant, highly surprising, counterfactual scenario).
The clarifications in this footnote also show, I believe, that my response to Hayward in the text is immune to general worries about metaphysical modality (see Clarke-Doane 2019).
Unless, that is, all that is meant by saying that a belief in a conditional is “maximally fragile” is something like that it amounts to junk knowledge, that upon coming to believe its antecedent the justification for believing the conditional is eliminated. In correspondence, Bedke confirmed that this is roughly what he had in mind. Now, the term “maximally fragile” is Bedke’s, and he can stipulate whatever meaning for it that he pleases. But then, of course, it cannot be taken for granted that there is anything at all problematic about such “maximal fragility”. And C3 shows that there isn’t.
Again see my Taking Morality Seriously (2011), chapter 2. I want to emphasize that I do not there argue that moral antirealists have objectionable moral dispositions or some such. Rather, I argue that (a small subset of) antirealists, if they are to accommodate the substantive moral intuition I am working with there, can offer less than realists by way of explaining it.
Though in my “A Defense of Moral Deference” (2014) I argue that the discussion of moral deference is independent at least of most metaethical disputes.
Bedke uses (4, 10) the example of a divine command theorist, who is vulnerable to Bedke’s dilemma just like the realist. But it’s actually a very interesting question about divine command theorists whether they are willing to think of conditionals like “If God doesn’t forbid humiliating people, then humiliating people is not wrong” as junk knowledge, and I don’t expect a unified answer to apply to all divine command theorists (I say a bit more about this in my “Oh, All the Wrongs I Could Have Performed! Or: Why Care about Morality, Robustly Realistically Understood”, unpublished manuscript). If a specific divine command theorist answers in the negative, the analogy between her and the moral realist breaks down here.
Bedke doesn’t argue for the claim that it’s morally repugnant to treat the information in the antecedent of (C2) as morally relevant. He repeatedly asserts that this is so, and he uses some analogies to other cases of relying on information that is clearly morally irrelevant (7). So there are no arguments I can engage here in response. Still, what he says here does have an air of intuitive plausibility, and it’s the task of what follows in the text to undercut this intuitive plausibility.
I am here ignoring – safely, I think – related discussions of moral uncertainty, of the legitimacy of relying on statistical evidence, and so on.
Of course, realists believe that it will not appear. And the more confident they are in their realism, the more confident they are that evidence to the contrary will not come about.
Again see my Taking Morality Seriously (2011).
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For relevant discussions and comments on previous versions, I thank Matt Bedke, Melis Erdur, Camil Golub, Roy Sorensen, Levi Spectre, and two anonymous readers for Philosophical Studies.
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Enoch, D. Thanks, We’re good: why moral realism is not morally objectionable. Philos Stud 178, 1689–1699 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01507-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01507-x